The evolution of automation of business tasks continues to expand at a dramatic pace. The business case for such automation is clear. Enterprises that can use automated systems to improve responsiveness to the customer can often gain a competitive advantage. It has been shown that for most processes, 90% of process time is attributed to information transfer time and 10% to the actual performance of the tasks. This need to allocate more time to the actual performance of tasks has led to significant effort to improve the automation of workflow.
Workflow relates to the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. The concept of Workflow incorporates the operational aspect of a work procedure, including the structure of the tasks, the actors who will perform the tasks, the order in which the tasks are performed, synchronization of the tasks, the information flow necessary to support the tasks and tracking of the status of the tasks.
Workflow Management is increasingly being exploited by businesses in a variety of industries. The objective of workflow management is the automation of processes involving combinations of human and machine-based activities, particularly those involving interaction with information technology. Heavy users of workflow management technology include industries such as insurance, banking, legal and general administration.
One of the challenges of effectively implementing a workflow management system, particularly in a service organization, is to automate the initial assignment of tasks once a service request has been received. The fundamental difficulty is one of matching the task to be performed with the individual having the requisite skills and availability to perform the task. In a typical approach to assigning a task to a service provider, a customer requests service (e.g. makes a claim under his/her insurance) from a customer representative. This may occur by way of a telephone call to a call center. The customer representative will typically collect information about the service being requested. In the case of an automobile insurance claim, the information may include the name of the insured, details about the accident, the vehicles involved, where the accident took place, the other party involved, the other party's insurance company, etc. The customer representative would collect the information and send it to a queue for further processing by the work unit that will accomplish the task. A work unit manager would review the requests for service in the queue and assign a service provider to handle the task. The assignment would go into the individual service provider queue. The individual service provider would then provide this service when he/she is ready to accomplish the request in his/her queue. One drawback of the typical process is that there is a significant time lag between the interaction with the customer by the customer representative and the actual assignment of the task to an individual service provider. Ideally, the customer would like to know the identity of the individual who will provide the service as soon as possible.
In the insurance industry, the assignment of a claim to a claim handler or claim adjuster is recognized as a significant bottleneck in delivering customer service. In many insurance companies auto and property claims (loss reports) are taken by claims representatives and assigned to a claim handler code associated with a work queue rather than a person. A group of designated representatives must then manually transfer the claim (loss) from the work queue to the claim handler code associated with the primary claims adjuster. In order to do this, they must manually classify the claim, manually determine which location and skill level of adjusters are appropriate to handle the claim, and manually determine which adjuster is next in line to receive an assignment.
A number of technology vendors market workflow systems (e.g. the Siebel 7.8 insurance module) that decompose a claim into segments while optimizing the assignment of these claim segments to claims adjusters and service providers. A “Score-Based Assignment” is used to automate the assignment of the claim to the claim adjuster and service providers based on a broad range of criteria, including skills or expertise, region, language, and workload. Another commercially available application, “Guidewire ClaimCenter,” is described as providing automated, rules-driven segmentation and assignment of claims and exposures based on any attributes of the claim or the claims organization. Although many companies today claim to have automated segmentation and assignment processes, they lack the flexibility to support ever-changing business needs. Many of today's workflow management systems as implemented in the insurance industry have a problem dealing with the unavailability of claim handler's as a result of vacation, illness, overloading and the like. The result is that claims may be offered to too few, too many, or the wrong claim handlers.
In view of the above, it is desirable to provide a workflow system that is user-friendly and provides the flexibility to support evolving business needs. It is desirable to provide a workflow system that provides a recommendation of an individual who will handle a task to a customer service representative interacting with a customer. It is further desirable to provide the customer service representative with the ability to accept or override the recommendation. It is further desirable for the customer service representative to be able to tell the customer, at the initial customer interaction, the name and phone number of the person to whom the task has been assigned.